San Francisco, Calif.'s Community Arts and Education Program, formerly the Neighborhood Arts Program, is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Neighborhood Arts was "a national trailblazer in nurturing art in places outside the circles of high culture," says Jesse Hamlin in the San Francisco Chronicle (4/21/08). Founded in 1967, " when the city was ground zero for countercultural ideas," says Hamlin, its purpose was "nurturing arts for and by the people where they live and work." The program, said former Mime Troupe playwright Joan Holden, "definitely had a populist and progressive vibe. There was this upsurge of culture up from the bottom - rock music, free theater in the park - and they nurtured that. They were multicultural before the word existed. They fertilized the grassroots." It grew to become the CAED program and it thrives in the city's ethnic neighborhoods today. (Thanks, Judith Tannenbaum.) [LINK] Posted by Linda Frye Burnham